Bringing Out the Superhero Side of Mr. Mom

It was high noon at Costello, a North Side sandwich shop, with 13 mothers in a lunchtime struggle with toddlers, most of them in highchairs. Potato chips were dropping on the black-and-white checkerboard floor and juice was spilling on black tabletops.

“Please, just one bite,” a mother said plaintively as a live folk singer incongruously played “Long Black Veil,” with its melancholy opening: “Ten years ago on a cold dark night, someone was killed beneath the town hall light.”

Pat Byrnes was an island of comparative calm as he dealt with Lucy, his 3-year-old daughter. Her lone challenge was whether to focus on her food or the Tom and Jerry cartoon on a nearby television.

Mr. Byrnes, the only father in the place shepherding a child, was nonchalant as Lucy swiped his pretzels and returned to Tom and Jerry. Mr. Byrnes took in the high-decibel scene as if he, too, were reporting — which he unavoidably was.

“I absolutely do feel myself as an outsider,” he said. “It’s partly by natural disposition but also as a guy who’ll be on the playground, watching women looking at me, then checking their cellphones and the sex-offender list.”

That Mr. Byrnes is pointedly droll is no surprise. He is a contributing cartoonist to The New Yorker and creator of Captain Dad, a blog with a voice that is part Dave Barry, part Erma Bombeck and all Pat Byrnes, illustrator, cartoonist and social commentator. He is married to Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general.

He started this impressionistic foray, a mix of prose and illustrations, in January (he calls it “the manly blog of stay-at-home parenting”).

One post, “How to Talk to Your Kids So They’ll Listen,” has a New Yorker air, depicting a father looking into a video camera and two children staring in the opposite direction at a television image of him.

“That Thing You Do” is a sweet riff inspired by lunches with Rebecca, his and Ms. Madigan’s 6-year-old, and by an image he scribbled on a napkin. It memorializes her foot pressing against his knee like a footrest and how he would miss that feeling when she grew up.

The posting reveals: “Her little sister and I now go off to eat on our own. I was thinking about this yesterday — when I felt another little foot using my knee as a footrest. I didn’t say anything.”

He writes of an exasperating Internet search for a dolphin costume for Rebecca; the perils of “green parenting” and biodegradable diapers; being impressed that Lucy wrote the word “dolls,” until she told him it spelled “zebra”; and of imagining Velcro pajamas with matching sheets.

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Robert Mankoff, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, finds Mr. Byrnes an “expert noticer” of small things that loom large but that we may miss. A Mankoff favorite was of a father and son at a Little League game, with the caption, “Just remember, son, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose — unless you want Daddy’s love.”

Mr. Byrnes, 52, grew up in Detroit and moved to Chicago when he was in his 20s. Before his 2003 wedding, he told a television interviewer that because he worked at home and his fiancée worked outside the home, he would take care of any children.

“After that, every woman who wouldn’t talk to me came up to say how wonderful I was.”

Ms. Madigan usually takes the girls to school. Mr. Byrnes picks up Lucy from preschool at 11:30 a.m.; they go to lunch and then back home for her nap. Later he picks up Rebecca from after-school activities.

“I’m thrilled that he’s as committed to raising our daughters and can find humor in it that should give other dads the inspiration to be their kids’ primary caretaker,” Ms. Madigan said when I saw her Thursday at the Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner sponsored by the Chicago Public Library and its foundation. Roger Ebert, the medically challenged but heroically irrepressible film critic, and Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” were the honorees and among 65 Chicago or Chicago-born authors initially gathered onstage.

The eclectic group included the novelists Sara Paretsky, Scott Turow, Sandra Cisneros and Stuart Dybek; Leon Lederman, the Nobel laureate physicist; James Lovell, the former astronaut; Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary; David Axelrod, standing in for President Obama; and Mr. Byrnes.

It was an inspiring homage to the written word — whether one creates shrewd private investigators, dissects financial crises, recalls flying to the moon or merely plucks revealing morsels from the commonplace of parents and children hanging at a sandwich shop.

jwarren@chicagonewscoop.org

A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2011, on Page A25A of the National edition with the headline: Bringing Out the Superhero Side of Mr. Mom. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe